


Bruce and Carol’s Wonderful Space Adventure

by BarbaraKaterina



Series: At The Rope's End [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen, or part of it anyway, ragnarok fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 06:19:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17259137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BarbaraKaterina/pseuds/BarbaraKaterina
Summary: Bruce and Carol go into space to save the universe.Also, Bruce gets interrupted a lot.This is part of the End of a Rope verse, and will make very little sense without it.





	Bruce and Carol’s Wonderful Space Adventure

**Author's Note:**

> Happy new year! This is pretty much a direct continuation of chapter 19 of At the End of a Rope, from Bruce’s POV.

Bruce had the good sense to let the other guy out intentionally this time, so the shock of Asgard did not tear him out, but feeling the strong gravity was still unpleasant. Carol, too, grimaced when they landed in it.

“Well,” she said. “The lighter gravity of Sakaar certainly sounds like a dream just about now.”

“Courage, friends!” Thor boomed. “The ship should be here any moment. I had arranged it with my father, after all.”

He motioned them towards the rainbow bridge that stretched before them, and obediently, they marched, Hulk looking a little nervously over the edge to the deep drop bellow. It was making him itchy. He was aware that the fall from there might kill even him. Bruce, in the back of his mind, knew the fall would lead to the nearby black hole, and it was making him even more itchy. The sooner they were on the ship, the better.

One did, indeed, arrive to the other end of the Rainbow Bridge as they were approaching it. It was golden, sleek, and only about as big as a small airplane.

Thor frowned at it when he saw it. “It is not one of the more impressive ships we have,” he muttered.

Just as he said it, the door opened and the pilot stepped out, bowing. It was a little strange, seeing Thor treated like the prince he was. “The king your father requested speed and secrecy, my prince,” he said. “For that, this ship is the best.”

Thor nodded, though he still seemed a little reluctant, and the pilot turned to the other two. “My name is Hodr, esteemed guests,” he said, “and I am one of Asgard’s pilots. Which one of you will be in charge of the ship?”

Carol stepped forward, and Bruce thought about how much he appreciated that the Hulk hadn’t been dismissed outright by this man.

They all piled in, and Hodr spent some minutes going over the controls, making sure Carol understood everything. Bruce did his best to listen from his back-seat, too, in case Carol was indisposed on their return trip and also because, well, it was fascinating. Engineering wasn’t normally so much his thing, but come on. This was a spaceship. Besides, he had been Tony’s friend long enough to gain some appreciation by osmosis.

When the explanations were done, the pilot departed with another bow, and Thor turned to them both with a pinched expression. “Are you certain you do not wish me to come with you?” he asked, clearly itching to accompany them.

“We will be fine,” Carol said with a reassuring smile. There was a reason it was the two of them going, after all. “Go keep the Earth safe for us.”

“Upon my honour,” he replied. “Good luck, friends, and bring me news of my brother!” 

Fortunately, he turned to leave as soon as he said it, heading back to the Einstein-Rosen bridge, and so he missed Carol’s slight grimace and Hulk’s much more obvious one. The sooner Thor knew Loki was alive, at least, the better.

The door shut behind Thor, and Carol took a deep breath.

“All right then, buckle up,” she said. “Your first space flight – you’re in for a treat.”

She sat at the controls confidently, pushed a few buttons, and they peeled away from the rainbow bridge.

They were on their way.

Carol was studying the coordinates Jane and Loki had worked on so hard as she directed the ship. There were many notes in the margins, and after about thirty minutes, she turned to him and said: “It should be safe to turn back now.”

Bruce tensed even as he pushed himself forward, but after some hesitation, the other guy actually stepped back and let him take the wheel. It seemed Loki’s amulet worked. Well, thank god – one particular god, apparently – for small mercies.

“So, we have a few hours,” Carol said when she saw he was back and dressed. “Wanna go over the plans again?”

Bruce groaned. “Sorry,” he said, “but I feel like we’ve done that ad nauseam.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “This is the first officially sanctioned mission humans have ever had outside the solar system,” she said. “Forgive me if I’m a little on edge.”

“Is it, though? Officially sanctioned, I mean?” Bruce prodded. “I’m pretty sure Tony implied the Council had no idea what we were doing exactly.”

Carol shrugged. “No, but they do know – or at least Sikorski definitely knows – that we’re in space, and that it’s at Asgard’s request. We had to give an explanation for why we’d be out of action for a while, that’s a matter of planetary security after all. Tony just made it clear Sikorski had no say in it.”

Bruce frowned. “I’m more worried about the ‘Asgard’s request’ bit. Tony should be careful – that’s the second favour for Asgard the council knows about, and if they start thinking the relationship is too unequal...”

Carol shook her head. “It is unequal, and they know it. They’re too worried about offending Asgard to do anything unless Asgard turns hostile, though of course they’re developing weapons, too. But they’d do that anyway.”

“I’m more worried about them thinking the Avengers aren’t really loyal to them,” Bruce explained.

She shrugged. “They know that too – they know they forced the Accords on us, or, well, them. They have weapons for that as well, you can be sure of that.”

Bruce sighed. “I thought you were an optimist?”

“Yeah, so I have hope they won’t ever use them. But I’m not actually an idiot. If nothing else, I’ve known Nick Fury too long to have any kind of naivete left.”

Bruce’s eyes gleamed with interest. “Speaking of which, how did that happen?”

She grinned. “So, you wanna hear a story?”

-

It took some telling, and by the time it was done they were only about two hours away from Sakaar, if everything went according to plan, and so Carol took a deep breath after the laughter her tale had concluded with and said: “Time to put our masking on.”

The ship they were flying was, as far as Bruce understood it, the prototype of a new kind of ship Asgard had started working on a few months ago. Unlike all the others, it actually had stealth mode and a few masking modes which didn’t announce to all and sundry they were from Asgard. Even the inside, Loki had told them, was done in such a way that it looked a little more neutral than the Asgardian ships normally did.

Given the relative prominence of gold, Bruce wondered if the standard was portraits of Odin everywhere.

Now that they engaged the camouflage, though, they apparently looked like any other ship that could be flying through this part of the galaxy, and then the only thing left to do was crashing elegantly enough that they both survive, as well as the ship staying mostly intact.

“You also need to get away from the wreck as soon as possible,” Carol repeated for the umpteenth time, “people don’t know you left the planet, you...”

“Yes, I know, Carol,” Bruce said a bit impatiently. “I just don’t know whether the other guy will actually follow these orders.”

“Let’s just pray, then,” Carol muttered.

Instead of answering, Bruce let the other guy out to prepare for the landing. Apart from preventing a situation where he would emerge angry after the crash, it was also a way to manage Bruce’s nervousness. He trusted Carol, he did, but this was still his first time flying with her, so his knowledge of her excellent pilot skills came only from hearsay, and so it was more difficult to convince himself to trust her on an instinctual level. When he took a back-seat like this, though, all the aspects of his psyche that were tightly tied to chemicals and hormones – fear, nervousness and others – receded, and only his higher thought processes remained. It was almost freeing, when he didn’t have to worry about the other guy destroying something or harming someone.

He thought back to the incursion into his mind Loki had made to craft the amulet for him. He had been resigned to it as a necessity, well aware that Loki could do it whenever he wanted without his permission anyway, so there was little point in worrying about possible nefarious intentions, and also secure in the knowledge that Loki would not actually want to wake the other guy. He had still been slightly worried, but much less than at the idea that he’d turn into the other guy on Sakaar and stay that way. And in the end, it hadn’t really been so bad. Yes, he got glimpses of some traumatic memories as Loki rummaged through his mind, but he dreamed of those things with regularity and in more detail than that had provided. He wondered if Loki had seen more, or if the procedure was really that non-invasive. With all they had to do before departure, he didn’t even find the time to ask.

Perhaps he should, once they were back. He began to consider that when they crashed.

The other guy staggered out of the slightly damaged ship and actually cooperated, meaning he began to walk away as Carol stepped out as well and did her best to extinguish the small fire that had started on crashing before it could spread.

They were in the middle of a trash heap, just like Loki had told them they would be, and so the Hulk’s progress was slow as he frequently stopped to examine this or that strange object he came across. It was only thanks to that that he even heard the scavengers approach when they did.

Hulk grunted and turned around, and Bruce watched, mostly detached, as the group approached Carol and tried to apprehend her.

Hulk was itching to fight, but Carol ahd told him that she wanted to try her luck on her own, and that was an argument he could somewhat listen to, so now he actually managed to watch impatiently as Carol kicked the three men’s asses for a while, before he got too eager to fight and headed in their direction, roaring for all he was worth.

Only the moment the men saw him, they froze, leading to Carol hitting one of them in the shoulder. “The Champion?” Another squeaked.

The other guy roared again, breaking into a run, and the remaining men turned on their heels and sprinted towards their ship. It took off just as the other guy reached it, and Brřuce spent some time trying to calculate forces and velocity and other interesting things that influences whether the ship would manage to fly away or not, but unfortunately, he didn’t really have enough information about its specs to make the equations viable.

Whatever they were, it was enough to shake the Hulk off after a while and fly away.

And just as it did, another ship landed nearby – no crash, and it didn’t come through a portal, Bruce noted – and a woman stepped out.

Bruce recognized her instantly, but more importantly, so did the other guy.

And there was no stopping him.

“Big guy?” The Valkyrie said tentatively, staring at the approaching figure.

“Angry girl!” The other guy called, thrilled, running towards her.

Bruce was as alarmed as he could be in the background and tried to wrestle control back to himself, but this time he wasn’t allowed. He watched, horrified, and waited for their mission to end when Hulk crushed their only source of information.

To his astonishment, however, the other guy embraced the Valkyrie rather tenderly – for him, anyway – and she seemed to have no trouble with it, hugging him back.

“What are you doing back?” She asked then, when they let each other go.

“Banner and Sunny Girl brought back!”

“Sunny girl?” Valkyrie asked with a frown.

Carol stepped out from behind the ship. “Hello?” She said with a smile.

Valkyrie shot the Hulk an amused look. “Sunny girl. You have a point.”

“Well, you don’t seem all that angry,” Carol pointed out.

The Valkyrie gave her a scowl.

“All right, all right, point taken,” Carol replied with a laugh.

“What are you doing here?” Valkyrie asked her grimly.

“Bruce wanted to talk to you,” Carol said with a nod to the Hulk.

“Bruce?” Valkyrie asked, with her voice suffused with doubt.

“Puny Banner,” Hulk said by way of an explanation, and then, to Bruce’s astonishment, stepped back. 

The surprise made the transformation a bit longer than usual and even more unpleasant, but at the end of it Bruce was behind the wheel, wearing – as usual – only the special Stark Pants of Infinite Stretch.

And the Valkyrie was staring at him.

“...what?”

Bruce grimaced. “Yeah. It’s a whole...thing. A failed experiment, and, well. Now there’s kinda two of us, but, you know. Just one in control at any given time.”

“And your name is Bruce?”

“Yeah. Bruce Banner. Nice to meet you.”

Valkyrie looked at his outstretched hand for a moment, then muttered: “You wanted to talk to me?”

“Yeah.” Bruce ran his hand through his hair to get rid of the awkwardness of it just sticking out between them. 

“Why?”

“Um.” Bruce blinked. This was all going much faster than he had expected. “Do you want to come in,” he asked, gesturing to the ship, “and sit down for this?”

“No. Talk.”

“All right.” Bruce took off his glasses, realized he wasn’t hearing a shirt and so had nothing to polish them on, and put them back on. “So, there’s this thing about Hela, which I’m told you know all about…?”

Valkyrie's expression grew even more stony. “Who told you that?”

Bruce sighed. “It’s...complicated. We have an ally-”

“Who’s we?” She interrupted.

“The Avengers, which is a group of heroes from Earth-” Bruce began.

She jumped in again. “You’re from _Earth_?” She asked, staring.

“Yeah.” Bruce shrugged, half apologetic. “It’s slowly developing into not being such a backwater of the universe as it used to be, from what we hear. But, anyway, we have an ally who has a...” Bruce thought carefully of how exactly Loki had told him to phrase this. “...contentious relationship to Asgard. He was raised there, and he still has some ties, though he hates the remaining royal family.”

“Remaining?”

“I understand the Queen died not that long ago?”

The Valkyrie shrugged and nodded for him to continue.

“This ally of ours,” Bruce said, “through his contacts in Asgard I gather, caught whiff of what you knew about Hela, and combined with some other forces we know are gathering-”

“What other forces?” The Valkyrie was clearly one for interrupting.

Bruce hesitated. “I’d rather not-”

“Thanos,” It was Carol who interrupted him this time, speaking for the first time since introducing herself. “Have you heard of him?”

The Valkyrie was frowning. “I have, and recently too. What does he have to do with Hela?” She scoffed. “And don’t tell me he’s an ally. She doesn’t have allies, only servants.”

Bruce shot Carol an irritated look, and she shrugged and explained: “We think he wanted to wake her and use her to tear Asgard to pieces for him. In the midst of a civil war, they would have no time to stop him destroying the universe.”

“And you didn’t want to share this why?” Valkyrie asked Bruce sharply.

He shrugged. “We don’t know you. If you told Thanos we’re aware of this...”

The Valkyrie grinned, and there was something very feral about it, something that made the other guy stir. “Ah, so you meant to actually give me a choice in whether I go with you or not,” she observed. “‘Sunny girl’ here didn’t plan to.”

Bruce turned to Carol with a scowl, but she just shrugged. “You know how crucial this mission is,” she said. “It’s not like we have alternatives.”

“Well,” the Valkyrie said with an even sharper grin, “if you’re so keen to fight...let’s fight.”

And she attacked.

Carol shot up in the air as soon as the Valkyrie moved, and the Asgardian gave her an incredulous look. “Fuck me,” she muttered, and shot at Carol, who dodged expertly. 

Bruce, meanwhile, let the other guy take the wheel. He did so enthusiastically, but as he laughed and ran at the Valkyrie, it became obvious he saw it all as some kind of game. 

A deadly game, sure, but still. 

The Valkyrie, too, obviously knew very well how he fought, because she predicted him with ease, danced around him and then jumped on his shoulders in an effort to reach Carol. 

The captain evaded again, and the Valkyrie scoffed. “You know, I could just walk away. You want to capture me.” 

Carol grimaced, and fired. 

It was Valkyrie's turn to dodge, and she used the Hulk instead of a shield. 

They were at a stalemate for a time, Valkyrie having that advantage and Carol the air. It looked like maybe it would come down to who got tired first, but then Hulk ran out of patience and grabbed both women by their necks, none-too gently. 

“Fight!” He declared, apparently thinking what had been happening until now did not count, and set them both on the ground. 

Bruce tried to take back control, but the other guy was having too much fun to let him. 

Now, every time Carol tried to take off, he caught her, and when the Valkyrie tried to use him as a shield again he tried to smash her in turn. 

The women were circling each other. Bruce was feeling rather pessimistic about things - Carol's flight was a big advantage and being robbed off it made the fight too uneven. 

But just as he thought then, he saw Carol float just a little up - not out of reach, but enough that she had an unexpected angle - and attack again. 

Maybe there was still a chance? 

The fight dragged on, but this time there were hits, and gradually both combatants were looking worse for wear. 

And then Carol got in a lucky shot just as the Valkyrie executed a precise lunge, and they fell away from each other, both bleeding heavily. 

Hulk clapped. 

“Good fight!” He shouted. 

“It was,” the Valkyrie conceded with a grin, then added, “once the sunny girl stopped holding back.” 

Carol slowly sat up, holding her side. “So… Now what?” She asked. 

“Well,” the Valkyrie drawled, “now hopefully, you tell me what you want.”

“We need you to come with us back to Earth.”

“To Earth? Not to Asgard?” Valkyrie asked sharply. 

Bruce wrestled the control back from the Hulk, so the conversation was interrupted for the time of his transformation. Afterwards, panting and exhausted, Bruce said: “No. No Asgard. Our ally…Didn't think you'd be willing to go there.”

“He's right about that,” the Valkyrie said with a laugh that held no humour. 

“We would need to go through Asgard,” Carol clarified, “but I give you my word that it’s not a trick. We simply can’t land a spaceship on Earth when Earth still doesn't have spaceships. It would cause a major panic.”

“And a Bifrost landing won’t?”

“No. People are used to that,” Carol replied simply. They were not actually planning to get the Valkyrie back by Bifrost, but Loki had warned them not to tell her that. Something about Asgardian fighters not liking magic. It made very little sense to Bruce, but he supposed Loki knew better.

The Valkyrie blinked in surprise at the information, and then she frowned. “Your ally seems to know a lot about me.” 

“He's… Very observant.” Bruce said carefully.

“Who is he?” When Bruce hesitated, she added: “I'm not coming unless I know that much.” 

“I'm not sure about everything myself to be honest,” Bruce said slowly. “the… Leader, I suppose, of our group, knows the whole background, but… What I do know is that this guy was adopted by the Asgardian royal family at some point and was raised there. I gather he is actually from some species of people Asgard hates? Anyway it seems to have been a secret his whole childhood and puberty so when he found out he was… Really rather angry. He basically cut all ties, and in fact they believe him to be dead and he moves there in disguise.”

“So a Jotun, then,” the Valkyrie surmised.

Bruce blinked. “How did you know?”

“A species Asgard hates, and can shapeshift? Must be a Jotun.” She shrugged. “It could be worse, I suppose. At least he’s not a Dark Elf, though why Odin decided to adopt a Jotun is beyond me.” She scoffed. “Maybe after Hela, he thought another difficult child was the best thing for his realm. So, why does this pretending-to-be-dead Jotun want to talk to me?”

“Well, he might not exactly adore Asgard at the moment, but at the same time it was the only home he ever knew. So he doesn't actually want it to be destroyed by Hela, and he specially doesn’t want Thanos to succeed in his mission, so he’s trying to nudge things the best he can to prevent that.“

“He sounds…Intriguing,” The Valkyrie conceded. “How did he know about me?“

“I don't actually know,” Bruce realized. “I gather he has some contacts in the royal palace in Asgard still, but it's not like he tells me stuff.” 

“Not on good terms with the little frost giant?” The Valkyrie asked with her sharp grin.

Bruce grimaced a little. “Well the big guy did beat him into the ground and broke his spine a few years back, so…” 

The Valkyrie laughed. “I like you,” she said then. “All of you. All right. I'm coming with you.”

Carol blinked. “Just like that?” 

The Valkyrie gestured to her injured side. “What, you want another fight?” 

Without further protest, Carol went inside to ship to bandage herself, and then began repair works.

“We should probably move it,” Valkyrie said after a moment, in an observational tone. “The Grandmaster sent me here to get the big guy back. Ever since he left, there’s no poper champion in the arena, and there have been attempts at a revelation recently, without a heavyweight to scare people into obedience. He needs him, and once he realizes I’m not bringing him, he’s gonna send others.”

“Oh great,” Bruce muttered under his breath, and went to see if he could help Carol in any way, even though he knew nothing at all about spaceships.

“Incoming,” the Valkyrie said about thirty minutes later. The ship wasn’t exactly back in top shape, but it was, thankfully, functional again, and so they all piled in and Carol was staring the engines by the time Valkyrie was shutting the door.

“Does this thign have guns?” She asked.

“Yes,” Carol replied. “It has automatic defence systems, mostly, but if you want manuals, come over here.”

Valkyrie did. Bruce, who knew even less about shooting than he did about repairing spaceships, only watched with increasing nervousness as Carol swerved in varying directions while the Valkyrie’s fingers ran over the controls, doing who knew what. But gradually, all three ships following them dropped from the sky, and then they were finally free of the planet’s orbit.

Once they were safe – or reasonably safe, but Valkyrie seemed confident the Grandmaster wouldn’t have them followed into space - Bruce went to sleep, exhausted from his many transformations. The women, however, both stayed in the cockpit, and there was a long silence between them. 

“Damn,” Valkyrie broke it then, “I should have brought some alcohol.” 

“Sorry, can't help you there.” 

“So,” the Asgardian said after a moment, “Bruce said you were part of a group of heroes. What kind?”

“All right,” Carol conceded, checking that the navigation was set the way it was supposed to be for the third time, “storytime.”


End file.
